Newsweek says:...as our prediction of earthquakes becomes better, so does our ability to prepare for these natural disasters.andAs a result, people have more time to prepare and evacuate, thus minimizing the quake’s possible devastation.

There's just one glaring problem with these statements: No one has ever successfully predicted an earthquake. The research they reference suggests there may be a correlation between a slowing of the earth's rotation and a period of high seismic activity, based on past data. It has never been used to predict anything... until now.

If that correlation turns out to be due to a genuine cause-and-effect mechanism, there may be a higher probability of strong earthquakes occurring sometime soon (maybe in 2018 and maybe not), somewhere in the world (we won't know where until it happens).

Newsweek's suggestion that this can in any way help people "prepare and evacuate" is really quite idiotic and irresponsible.

bro4bro saidNewsweek says:...as our prediction of earthquakes becomes better, so does our ability to prepare for these natural disasters.andAs a result, people have more time to prepare and evacuate, thus minimizing the quake’s possible devastation.

There's just one glaring problem with these statements: No one has ever successfully predicted an earthquake. The research they reference suggests there may be a correlation between a slowing of the earth's rotation and a period of high seismic activity, based on past data. It has never been used to predict anything... until now.

If that correlation turns out to be due to a genuine cause-and-effect mechanism, there may be a higher probability of strong earthquakes occurring sometime soon (maybe in 2018 and maybe not), somewhere in the world (we won't know where until it happens).

Newsweek's suggestion that this can in any way help people "prepare and evacuate" is really quite idiotic and irresponsible.

This reminds me of back in 1990 and 1991 when they kept predicting that the New Madrid Fault in the mid Mississippi Valley was supposed to rupture violently yet nothing ever happened.

Back in the mid 80s, a Spanish language newspaper in LA printed a story that a big earthquake was going to strike the city on a specific date, based on the word of a psychic. Caltech's Seismological Laboratory immediately contacted the paper, scolded them severely, and asked how they could be so irresponsible as to print that.

The paper replied, "Well, we asked you when the next earthquake was going to happen and you said you didn't know. But the psychic said he knew, so we went with his story."

The quake at St. Helens is related to building volcanic pressure, not tectonic activity. Granted, there's a relationship between tectonics and volcanics but not a direct one when it comes to specific earthquake events. Over the past 500+ years Mount St. Helens is known to have a major eruption about once every hundred years; the shortest period between major eruptions was 57 years (1800-1857). The last big eruption was in 1980 so it's now been 37 years. We should expect earthquake activity to increase as it builds toward the next blowout.

The Rattlesnake Ridge fissure is also not related to tectonics. It's soft sediment deformation - a shifting of the soil as it's pulled slowly downhill by gravity, like a glacier of mud. It's a very common occurrence on steep hillsides with a thick soil base. In LA County, the south side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula is well known to experience this kind of soil slump; real estate values in that area are depressed as a result (because one day your yard is going to slide right out from under the house), and the road bed at Portuguese Bend has to be re-engineered every few years.